New Year Devvar-Netvar Analysis

In 2005, a "data-mining" assessment
of seven years of data around the New Year transition
was undertaken to develop a new hypothesis to test on future data.
Two recipes were devised, which differ in detail but are parallel to the
original analyses done in previous years.
This page gives results for the equivalent to the "standard analysis"
which was an epoch average of the cumulative deviation of Chisquare in
each timezone.

The 2006 recipe is an epoch average over 13 timezones of
the difference of two cumulative deviation curves. One is the the
Devvar (device variance), which our retrospective
analysis showed tends to have a positive deviation. From this we
subtract the Netvar cumulative (the Stouffer Z²,
which tends to have a negative deviation.
Thus, our prediction is a positive trend for Devvar, and a
negative trend for Netvar, and the test is a simple algebraic
difference, Devvar-Netvar.

We also determined that only a few timezones contribute to the
deviations, and not surprisingly, these are the heavily populated zones,
and especially those that tend to actually celebrate the conventional
Western New Year at midnight on December 31st.
The datamining identified 13 timezones, namely {-8, -7, -6, -5, -4, -3,
0, 1, 2,3, 5.5,8, 9}. This includes the US and European zones and a few
others.

For 2006, the result for this analysis is not positive, with a Z-score
of -0.510, and p=0.695. Though this is substantially different from the
average over the past several years, the difference is not significant.
Despite the lack of confirmation, we will continue to use this
new prediction in coming years. In principle, the likelihood of this
test showing positive results should be high.